House defense appropriators propose $500 million in fiscal 2026 for the U.S. Air Force E-7A Wedgetail airborne early warning aircraft by Boeing [BA] and turn back the Trump administration’s bid to cancel the plane as a successor to the E-3 Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS).
The House Appropriations Committee’s defense panel, in its version of a fiscal 2026 defense bill, said that “the committee firmly believes that a combination of air and space assets for mission sets such as early warning are necessary today and will be required well into the future.”
The bill is a cart before the horse, as the White House still has not sent to Congress a full fiscal 2026 budget request for DoD or the other federal departments and agencies.
Yet, administration budget request details are emerging from White House documents provided to reporters on background.
The coming DoD fiscal 2026 budget “terminates the E-7 request,” according to a budget document, which notes near term “AF reliance on [U.S. Navy] E-2D for future support” (Defense Daily, June 11).
The document says that the request declines from the $807 million appropriated in fiscal 2025 to $200 million–a level which may indicate DoD plans to close out the Air Force’s five-year, $2.5 billion rapid prototyping contract awarded last summer.
Northrop Grumman [NOC] builds the E-2D Advanced Hawkeye. House defense appropriators have proposed $1.2 billion for four E-2Ds in fiscal 2026.
Since 2023, the Air Force has retired 15 of the 31 aircraft in the service’s AWACS fleet, as the service looked to field the Wedgetail. Air Force officials in the Pacific have listed E-7 as a top need.
“Our assessment is that [E-7] was gold-plated, late, and over-cost,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth testified at a Thursday House Armed Services Committee hearing in response to a question from Rep. Derek Schmidt (R-Kan.). “We look at the future fight–extending the E-2D is our view, alongside space-based ISR as the capability of the future–not a prospective hopeful future, but the technologies are there to begin to deliver even more robustly than an aerial platform. Our budget does reflect those tough choices.”
Space-based air moving target indication (AMTI) is to receive a boost with $2 billion in the DoD reconciliation bill. The Department of the Air Force has discussed AMTI from space since September 2021.
In March, the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies advised the Air Force to add more than $5 billion in its fiscal 2026 budget request to buy 26 Wedgetails to replace the 16 E-3 AWACS planes “in hospice care.”
Australia has fielded six Wedgetails for the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) at RAAF Base Williamtown.